North Vs. South

Up at the Villa, in the words of production and costume designer Paul Brown, is a study in contrasts: "between Italy and England, northern and southern Europe, the heat and the cold, and between a historic Italy and a modern Italy." Based on a 1940 W. Somerset Maugham novella, the film is set among the Anglo-American expatriate community in Florence, just prior to World War II. Brown says, "We tried to juxtapose rather violently all the elements, the Fascist architecture and the beauty and ...